Microsoft brings Visual Studio to the Mac

At Connect(); in November, Microsoft is launching a preview of Visual Studio for Mac. This is an exciting development, evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac.

This is Xamarin Studio IDE renamed to Visual Studio Mac – which is not the same as Visual Studio IDE for Windows. I think calling every IDE that MS buys or makes Visual Studio just makes things really confusing (Visual Studio Code for example).

As a C++ developer on MacOS, I sorely miss Visual Studio. It looks like this is for mobile and .NET development only. Visual Studio Code on MacOS supports C++. It will be interesting to see if and when they expand the scope of VS for Mac.

For even greater code sharing, you can use the cross-platform Xamarin.Forms UI library, which provides a familiar XAML-based development environment that can target multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, macOS and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP)